Human rights groups say E. Timor Truth Commission report should be
public even if Indonesia objects

NEW YORK, Dec. 16 (AP): East Timor should publicly release a Truth
Commission report on Indonesian atrocities during 24 years of occupation
even if it offends Jakarta, the lead researcher on the report and a key
human rights advisory group said.

Australia and the United States are also reportedly implicated in the
commission's findings, for quietly giving the green light to the
Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975.

East Timor's President Xanana Gusmao has repeatedly said he favors
reconciliation with Indonesia over seeking justice for an estimated
200,000 Timorese who died under Jakarta's rule.

Gusmao presented the 2,500-page Reception, Truth and Reconciliation
Commission report to Parliament last month but has not yet made it public.

Patrick Ball, who designed a unique survey of mortality rates before
and during Indonesian occupation, said Thursday that Gusmao owes it to his
people to let the truth out:

"Today's geopolitical convenience does not trump the Timorese
people's historical right to know their past," he told The Associated
Press. "This is a chance to understand a people's history."

East Timor deserves recognition and honor as "a tiny country
maintaining its focus on independence and survival," Ball said by
telephone from Bogota, Colombia, where he is working on another project.

The Truth Commission collected some 8,000 testimonies of personal
suffering, which were entered into a database, much as truth commissions
in South Africa and elsewhere have operated.

But "you need to know what normal mortality looks like to make an
assessment of intensified mortality," Ball said.

Ball's research team in East Timor sought to establish a baseline of
mortality prior to the Indonesian occupation, as a basis of comparison
with 1975-1999, when the former Portuguese colony was devastated during a
long war of liberation.

Indonesia's iron-fisted rule ended in 1999, after a UN-organized
plebiscite resulted in an overwhelming vote for independence.

Ball's researchers ran a random survey of 1,400 households to learn how
family members had died in recent decades. That, however, ran into the
problem of data becoming scarce as they surveyed back through decades to
seek elderly survivors.

"So we went and surveyed every public cemetery in East Timor. We
collected the names, dates of birth, and dates of death from 319,000
graves," Ball said.

"With that information, we can make a total mortality estimate. We
can make estimates by type of death, by killings, hunger and disease,
accidents."

The triple survey method allowed the Truth Commission to uncover the
"type of death, type of perpetrator - you can see the data emerging,
you can get a focus on it two or three different ways, and they all come
together," said Ball, the director of human rights programs for
Benetech, a private company based in Palo Alto, California, that designs
surveys of mass atrocities.